


Winter

by rosegardeninwinter



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Post-Mockingjay, Pre-Epilogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 11:17:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15795408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosegardeninwinter/pseuds/rosegardeninwinter
Summary: She is safe. They are safe. There are times she is convinced that it is all a dream. If it is, she hopes she dies still dreaming.Katniss and Peeta in winter, inspired by the sparklingly cozy prose of Mejhiren’s Hunger Games fairytales.





	Winter

She wakes in a gossamer moment, her face pressed into the sun-drenched pillow, light balancing on her lashes, knee curled into the soft stump of his left leg, breath the only sound in the air. She nudges her nose gently into the curve of his. His face twitches at the disturbance of his sleep and she smiles, running a hand through his hair. With soundless tread she slides into her slippers, wiggling her toes around to warm them. Frost has cobwebbed designs onto the window and she leans against the sill, absently admiring them while she combs her sleep-mussed hair. She collects her leather jacket from the bedpost and pulls it over her flannel pajamas. 

The cat brushes against her legs as she kneels to start a fire in the living room grate and she scratches him behind his graying ears. She tosses him a pinch of turkey from the icebox while she starts the stove for tea, and he gives a throaty purr, padding away to claim the floor in front of the fire. 

She moulds her fingers around the heat of her mug and settles into her chair at the kitchen table, propping her feet up and staring out the window at the sparkling trees, at the occasional drably-dressed bird that flutters over the yard. 

The sound of her bedmate’s walk is mismatched—sock-footed step and quiet click of metal against wood—but steady and familiar. His curls are a riot and he rubs his bleary eyes.

“I made you some tea,” she says, pushing his mug across the table to him.  


He kisses her forehead by way of thank you, sitting down and taking a sip. 

“Felt good to sleep in,” he tells her, eyes following her gaze to the winter morning outside. “Beautiful, isn’t it? You can never quite capture it in paintings.” He sets down his mug. “Cinnamon bread for breakfast?” 

He sets the table with the bread and with butter. She cuts up wedges of the last of the season’s apples. The fire snaps in the hearth. The bread is sticky and they lick their fingers while they eat. 

“We should go to town today,” she says. “I want to buy some cloth and peppermints.”

He nods, crunching on a bite of apple. “We ought to bring Haymitch some bread too while we’re out.” 

They fall into a comfortable routine. She sweeps the floor and he runs her a bath, steaming hot. She washes and runs the water again. He bathes while she dresses and braids her hair. She waits by the front door for him and ties a scarf around her neck. She supplies him with his knit hat, red as holly. He collects two loaves of hearty grain, wrapped in cloth, offers her his arm, and they enter the cold morning.

Empty bottles clink on the floor when they push open their former mentor’s front door. The man himself slumps at his kitchen table, fast asleep. The visitors exchange a fondly exasperated glance. 

He lays the bread by Haymitch’s elbow and extricates, with delicacy, the knife from the man’s clenched hand. 

“I think he’s actually asleep,” she murmurs, amused, “and not just drunk useless.” 

“Better let him rest then,” he says. “Let’s get these.” They dispose of the bottles and pour him a glass of orange juice for when he wakes. 

The quiet of their walk is not much broken when they reach the town, a small collection of recently built shops and houses painted in obstinately hopeful greens and blues. The crumbles of destruction that remain behind are weathering away or being shoveled out by strong men and women who used to be part of the mining crews. 

They pass by the new bakery, which pronounces his last name on the sign above the door, and she applies a proud pressure to his palm. 

A few shopkeepers gathered around a crackling fire at the seamstress’s storefront greet them as they pass, wishing them a good winter. It is a good winter. Not all of their winters are, not by a long shot, but this one, two years out from the end of the war, is surprisingly pleasant. 

The seamstress steps away from the fire to accompany them inside her store. 

He absently peruses colored skeins, while his companion admires bolts of fabric. 

“What about this one?” she asks, gathering a orange yard from the seamstress and holding it across her own arms. “For a dress?” 

He rubs the cloth between his fingers. “It’s very soft — and it is my favorite color,” he says approvingly. “Do you like it?” 

“I do, yes.”

“Then we’ll take it.” 

The seamstress carefully measures and cuts the fabric to size. “Anything else, dears?” 

“How about some of this yarn too?” he says. “You could use a new hat.”

“If you like.” 

“We’ll have some yarn too — and a spool of that thread for Buttercup,” he decides, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. The seamstress fetches it for them, and having paid, they step back into the cold. At the tiny sundries shop they acquire the desired peppermints and the owner offers them paper cups of piping hot chocolate, the steam from which billows in the air around their faces.

“Anything else you wanted?” she asks as they crunch up the path again. 

“We just need to post to Aurelius for more soap.” Their scarred bodies, which in some places are large patchworks of burns, require prescription bath supplies and lotions, which their doctor sends from far away. 

“I’ll hunt tomorrow,” she decides when they arrive home again and shed their boots and coats. “It’s supposed to be warmer; there’ll be more on the game trail.” 

She stokes the fire back to life and he gets his sketchpad and charcoal pencils, settling down in the squashy sofa. 

“Here,” she says, bumping his metal leg with her knee. “I think your ankle joint needs oiling.” 

Mobile as his prosthesis is, it still requires periodic attention, particularly during the cold months. He detaches it for her and she sits across from him on the couch, pouring oil into the joints. The leg rounds off at the end, toeless, but fit perfectly to his shoes. She gets a cloth and cleans it with care, as if it were a natural part of his body. He sketches her as she works, her head bent and brow furrowed in concentration. 

“Let’s go to the lake today,” he says. 

“It won’t be frozen. We won’t be able to skate.” 

“I know, but we can take a picnic to the cabin,” he says. “It’ll be nice.” 

“It would be nice,” she agrees. “We should go now then, before dark.” 

They pack a wicker basket with food. Cider and cheese and leftover apples from that morning. She brings the rest of the turkey and two hard boiled eggs. They bundle up even heavier than before. 

The fallen forest leaves are brown and brittle; even her light step does not go entirely undetected. A slight wind nips at their noses and ears, brushing them rosy. The midday sun cuts through the bare trees, gilding dust. She moves ahead of him a few paces, darting alongside a stream. 

“We don’t have to hurry, you know,” he calls to her. 

She spins on her heel, face flushed, to wait for him to climb up the bank to her side. Her brow creases slightly and she tilts her head to one side, studying him. 

“What?” he asks, scrambling up to join her. “What are you looking at me like that for?” 

“Oh,” she murmurs, “nothing.”

“Nothing?” he teases, taking her hand. 

“Not a thing,” she insists softly. 

He releases her hand only when they reach the tiny, one-room cabin. He takes the food inside. She skirts around the lake, dragging up the fish traps to check for a catch. They visit the lake often, once a place she shared exclusively with her father, but now she shares with the boy who has filled an empty space in her heart that the mine explosion left. She taught him how to swim here in the summer, and in the fall they built their cabin, and they taught themselves to skate last winter. Today the water is frigid, but not frozen. The traps are empty, but she doesn’t mind. Smoke pouring from the chimney pipe tells her a fire is burning in the hearth and she returns hungrily. 

The cabin is furnished sparingly but comfortably — a table and two chairs, an oak chest for miscellany, and the bed with the rosemaled headboard that used to belong to her mother, blanketed with furs. This is where he sits, their lunch laid out in front of him. The whole room is deliciously warm.

“This looks wonderful,” she praises. “Thank you.” 

“You got most of it — and some of it was running away too.”

“Then you have arranged my hard work satisfactorily,” she laughs and she nudges him in the shoulder.

When they have finished, she produces her needles and new yarn and sets about knitting the hat. Knitting is a recently acquired skill, picked up for diversion. It gives her a task when she can’t go hunting and he loves everything she makes, even the lumpy first attempts. 

He touches up his sketch of her, penciling her brows and sharpening her cheeks. When he finishes he takes to unbraiding and re-braiding her hair. The shifting of the firelight and the gentle tugging of his fingers makes her eyelids close.

When they open again she is nestled flush against the gray fabric of his sweater, the both of them stretched out across the bed. Her arms, pinned between them as she slept, slip around his middle and she draws herself closer to him. 

“We fell asleep,” she comments vaguely.

“That we did,” he replies in a smiling whisper. “For a good while too. It’s dark out.”

She sighs contentedly against his collarbone. She is safe. They are safe. There are times she is convinced that it is all a dream. If it is, she hopes she dies still dreaming. 

In her chest, butterflies flicker as a thought comes to her. 

_The Girl on Fire returns home, scorched and sister-less._

_The Boy with the Bread arrives later, with nothing in the world to call his own, save for a bottle of pills._

_He plants the flowers for which her sister was named. She hides behind her bedroom curtains and watches him._

_He leaves bread on her kitchen table. She lets it mold._

_She sleeps in her bathtub. He sleeps under his couch. Their lights remain on through the night._

_She dreams. Nightmares. He dreams. Episodes._

_She locks him out of her house. He sleeps on her doorstep._

_Her sleep is strewn with birds that wail for her in the voices of all her loved ones. She unlocks the door. They don’t both fit under a couch or in the bathtub so she pulls back the blankets of her bed for the first time in months._

_Some days she doesn’t sleep or eat. She curls under the covers and stares blankly at the ceiling. One awful night he finds her in the bathroom, blood running down her arms. She screams as they struggle over the razor, but he has always been the stronger one. “Don’t you ever do that again,” he orders her, washing and binding her wrists. Once she’s promised him she won’t, he wipes away her tears and carries her outside to breathe the cool air._

_She never breaks her word._

_He forgets his pills one evening and flips her onto the kitchen table, shattering plates and glasses, locks his fingers around her neck, spitting vicious words into her face. She tells him to stay with her until his primal pupils shrink to normalcy. He shuts himself in the attic and begs her not to come near. She pounds on the attic door until her fingers are riddled with splinters. She refuses to leave. When he emerges, red-eyed and shaky-kneed, she helps him gulp down water and take his medicine._

_“We’re the only family we have now. I’m not leaving you. Not again.”_

_Summer arrives. Summer brings trains. Trains bring people. People bring wood and determination. Houses go up._

_She strings her pearl on a silver chain. They put laundry out on the line together._

_They collect their parcels at the train: pills, burn creams and soaps, letters from Aurelius, along with a list of triggers to avoid if at all possible. (Bees, blood, dogs, loud noises, berries, needles, roses, and fire.)_

_“I don’t know how not to be a puppet,” he tells her wearily one night after she finds him in the far corner of the bedroom, plagued by nightmares._

_“Neither do I,” she says, cradling him in her arms like she might a child and humming lullabies against his heated brow._

_But they will figure it out._

_They must._

_He bakes. She hunts._

_They walk in the warm evening, watching fireflies in the twilit trees. One lands on his nose. She laughs. When the insect flits away, they find themselves inches apart. With the air aglow and no one to see, she kisses him._

_She dreams of a grave. Of her loved ones, shoveling earth over her, suffocating her. Only this time, as she resigns herself to drowning, there are hands, large and pale, digging six feet under, and she is being wrenched up into the clean air. She cries herself out against his shoulder when she wakes, but they’re grateful tears as well as sorrowful ones. Then inexplicably the both of them are laughing and half-crying and it’s ridiculous but it’s the happiest she’s felt in a long, long time — and with the happiness comes a strange and familiar hunger, the recollection of a swelteringly hot night on the arena beach, and beneath that, a softer sensation, something she cannot name, except to say that it makes her think of the color violet._

_“You love me.” “Real.”_

_He re-opens the bakery. She supplies him with fresh mint and wild onions and she waits by the back door with a full game bag and a kiss every closing time. Haymitch won’t shut up about it. (Until she hides his liquor.)_

_She dreams of the ocean. Finnick, waist deep in waves, his head thrown back to the sunlight, laughing. Mags, on the sand, weaving a basket with flowers, chuckling quietly at her own joke. So particular a dream, she knows there is truth in it. Wherever they are now, they are happy._

_He sells his house. She sings in the dark moments before dawn as they dress for the bakery and the woods._

_The cameras return. She shuts herself in the back closet. He bolts the doors and closes the drapes. Haymitch picks up his disused phone. They can hear him swearing at Plutarch from their back porch. The cameras leave and don’t return._

_He paints. She knits._

_Johanna clunks in at odd hours. During one visit, the three of them rid the house of the old Capitol bugs, smash them to bits against the village fountain._

_They work on the book. Annie sends them photos of baby Finn._

_She dreams of Lavinia, in the boughs of a tree, a book propped open in her lap, reading aloud — to no one it seems, but that does not matter, because the silenced girl has her voice back._

_She answers what she expects to be a phone call from her mother, but it is Gale who greets her. The exchange is less than a minute. ( “Hey Catnip.” “What is it?” “I’m sorry.” “I know you are.” “Is your boy there too?” “Yes.” A pause. “Good.” Another pause. “Do you think you and I will ever be able to speak again?” “Not yet,” she says, and then, before she hangs up, “but some day.”)_

_He sits in a chair on the porch and she cuts his hair when it grows too long, the way her mother and father used to. And they are very like her parents, aren’t they? The dusky miner’s child with the wild, enchanting voice and the merchant’s child with cornflower eyes who could not help but listen._

_They find a nest of bees in the back and she panics for him, but his only reaction is to ask if she knows how to gather honey. The cake he makes is maybe the best thing she’s ever eaten._

_They visit her father’s lake and swim late into the sunset hours when the water glows. They lie on the grass afterwards, clothes and hair damp, and watch the stars burn to life and they share old folk tales._

_Her dreamlands take her into a starry forest. Her father is there—far older and yet far younger than he ever was in life—kneeling beside a child in a pocket of white flowers. Prim. They are gathering, talking together. When she wakes, her heart is at peace, and she begins to long for the good dreams, wondering who she will see once more when she slips off. Darius or Wiress. Cinna or Portia. Madge or Boggs or Rue._

_There’s a harvest celebration in the town square. She wears a dress with buttons he hand-painted. The air is rich with the autumn scent of hickory smoke. They dance a quick country two-step to the music of the fiddle and flute: her braid coming loose, his shoulders brushing with fellow revelers._

_They get better, but not at all. Somewhere still is a piece of her heart, blown to bits on marble ground, scattered among the severed remains of children and nurses with bright red badges. Somewhere still is a piece of his spirit, strapped naked and trembling to a white table, awaiting the pinch of a syringe._

_And they live._

“Can I ask you something?”

“Anything,” he says. 

“You’re my husband, right?” 

She grins at the stunned expression on his face. He must think she is teasing but she is completely sincere. She does not drop her gaze and his wide eyes soften. 

“I’m your husband,” he repeats. “And,” he hesitates, “and you’re … you’re my wife.” It sounds like a question. 

“I’m your wife.”

Then he is pattering kisses against her mouth. She is thinking of yellow flowers and the rain that waters the meadow. She scrambles to her feet, dislodging him. 

“Where are you going?” 

“Home,” she says excitedly. “We need bread.” 

“We ate,” he says, like he suspects what she means, but wants to hear her say it anyway.

She doesn’t indulge him though, not yet. “C’mon, sweetheart,” she says, taking his hand and tugging him out the door. 

The sky is scattered with stars. The moon is full and bright, its light sparkling on the water and twining around the trees. They run hand-in-hand, flying like the un-caged birds they are, toward the lights of the town. Halfway to their house, he pulls her up short. 

“Let’s do it properly,” he pleads with her. “Let’s get the papers too.” 

She hesitates for a heartbeat; his words hang in the empty street. Then she threads her fingers through his and smiles. “Okay.”

“You mean it?” 

“Of course I do.” Then they’re off again, their boots pounding on the warm-lit cobblestones. 

Their flight halts in the lobby of the Justice Building with clutching at their sides and wind-swept hair. 

She can barely draw breath from running so he inquires after the papers. A neat print and a messy swoop later it’s done. 

Buttercup hisses and darts away into the bathroom when they come through the front door. 

What would people say if they knew? The Star Crossed Lovers of District 12. Without white finery, without a cake, without guests, without cameras. 

That’s the point though, isn’t it? This is their secret, their choice. After it all, those slips of paper, the musty cave, the endless trains and skin-flaked hospital beds, this is where they end. Where they begin. Kneeling on the hearthrug, washed in the light of the fire, a look that suits them so wrongly and yet so well, their calloused hands clasped. Feeding each other bread that tastes of almonds and raisins and coal. 

They watch the fire until it burns to embers in the grate and then he carries her upstairs to their bed. 

She wakes in a gossamer moment, her face pressed into the sun-drenched pillow, light balancing on her lashes, knee curled into the soft stump of his left leg, breath the only sound in the air. 

“Good morning, husband,” she whispers in a half-laugh, dancing her fingers down his face.

“Good morning, wife.” The arm draped about her waist draws her closer. Their scars align. 

They live.


End file.
